We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.
The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
See the moon? It hates us.
Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.
The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.
Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.
Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.
Maybe writing can’t be taught, but editing can be taught – prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.
The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.
The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.
Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one’s situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.
Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don’t count?
People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress.
As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them.
The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.
There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.
And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.
Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.
Write about what you’re afraid of.